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Does anyone have any experience in trying to rank for terms that are 100% similar in meaning but different words?

I will be using street signs and road signs as an example to make it clearer.

We previously only targeted street signs and then we realized that there is another keyword – road signs - that has twice as much traffic (more competitive too). Now we are trying to incorporate both in our onsite SEO.

If you had a similar case - how did you work with this? Did incorporating the keyword help rankings go up for that word? Does adding another keyword to the mix make the rankings go down for the keyword you previously ranked for?

3 Responses

A lot of internet marketing firms deal with this on their own campaigns. For example...

internet marketing company

online marketing company

web marketing company

website marketing company

The easiest way we've found to wrestle with this is through the anchor text you use in your link building tactics. Build some for a variety of the keywords and variations, and you should be able to rank for both keyword phrases.

However, Google might not 100% agree with your finding. If you do a Google search with the "~" in front of your phrase and review the bold phrases - Google will actually show you synonyms in bold throughout the page.

When I do this type of query for "street sign" - I don't see the word 'road' anywhere... and vice versa. Because of that, I might suggest making a page about road signs and strictly optimizing and link building to that URL for your target phrases for road sign.

I thought this was a great question. I do SEO for a niche site that runs into this all of the time. The site sells religious products. Ss you might imagine, there are Catholic church products, Protestant church products and non-denominational church products and everything in between. Each of these may have a completely different name for exactly the same item. For example, a mainline Protestant church will call a communion wafer a "wafer" while the Catholic church often refers to them as "hosts." In America we refer to the part of a church service where people break bread together and share wine or juice, Communion, but it's also referred to as the Eucharist in Catholica, Episcopal and Lutheran churches.

You can see this opens up a huge number of possibilities. Some searched more than other. I think it's a matter of having such intimate knowledge of your customers and product lines that you know exactly when to use which variations of the keywords. In certain situations they make perfect sense, but use the wrong combination of keywords with the wrong product, and you might succeed in getting search but could end up severely alienating your potential customers once they get to your site.

Thanks for the response, Dana. I feel like if I'm more specific I will be a lot more clear. We are an e commerce site that sells trash bags, recycling bags, contractor bags etc. When the site was built (7 years ago) the entire site used the word "garbage bags". Now we are trying to incorporate the word "trash bag" but so far the rankings for trash bags and garbage bags are dropping lower and lower...

Do you think that's because we are targeting more keywords and it's causing a drop in our original rankings?

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